Your organization or business knows that it’s important to measure the progress you’re making with your social media program or campaign, as we discussed in Getting started with social media metrics. But what do you measure, why and how?

There’s no single, simple answer, but today we’ll offer a framework to guide you through the thicket of differing approaches you should consider before implementing a metrics program. (If you have other approaches that have worked for you, please add them to the comments!)

Creating goals to advance your mission

First off, don’t obsess about metrics. In fact, forget about the data altogether. What you’re really trying to do is advance your organization’s mission. Metrics are just a tool to help you do that.

Before assigning someone on your staff to take ownership of metrics, ask yourself: What are the key items we need to track to determine if we’re moving the needle? Have I clearly formulated a set of goals to advance my organization’s strategic or business objectives? Once you have a set of goals in place, then, and only then, should you begin considering which tools to use for your measurements. (We’ll cover tools tomorrow.)

Start by listing a series of specific, concrete, short-term, measurable, achievable goals that advance your long-term mission. Most of these goals should be short-term and modest in scope. Your organization may want to:

Grow traffic to your website or blog

Grow your newsletter list

Motivate people to donate

Move people to take a specific action, like signing a petition

Turn supporters into volunteers

Increase sale of a product or service

Build visibility and authority for your brand or cause

Solicit micro-loans

Boost your following on Twitter or Facebook

Spur people to register to attend an event

Reduce operational costs by crowdsourcing tasks

Test the efficacy of one donation button vs. another

Enhance your site’s search engine rankings

Increase the number of blog comments people post

Reduce your site’s bounce rate (and increase stickiness)

All of these goals can — and should — be measured. And you’ll notice that while social media will be used to pursue and measure your progress in achieving many of these goals, others don’t involve social media at all. That’s OK. Social media should fold into your overall metrics program, not the other way around.

KPIs: How you’ll measure progress

Now that you have a list of goals, you’ll want to map them to Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs. A KPI is simply a metric that you track to assess whether you are accomplishing your business goals. There are literally hundreds of KPIs that you could be tracking in a spreadsheet, but your team will want to identify only a handful that matter most — the ones that will specifically help you achieve your goals.

For instance, if you want to grow your list of supporters, you’ll be able to measure the number of newsletter or RSS subscribers. If you want more interactivity on your blog, you can measure the average number of comments that people post.

Following is a partial list of KPIs/social interaction metrics put together by my friends at Econsultancy in London:

Key Performance Indicators

Blog comments

Downloads

Email subscriptions

Likes or Fans

Favorites (add an item to favorites)

Followers (follow something / someone)

Forward to a friend

Groups (create / join / total number of groups / group activity)

Install widget (on a blog page, Facebook, etc.)

Personalization (pages, display, theme)

Ratings

Registered users (new / total / active / dormant / churn)

Reviews

Time spent on key pages

Uploads (add an item, e.g. articles, links, images, videos)

There are dozens more, but you get the idea. Some of these social interactions may map to multiple goals. Last year the the Interactive Advertising Bureau released a document detailing social media metrics and definitions.

Get strategic: Determine formulas for calculating success

We know of a lot of nonprofits and companies that simply maintain a spreadsheet, check it occasionally to see if the numbers are trending in the right direction and pay little heed to what they could be learning if they dug a little deeper. That’s what the rest of this article is about.

In an April 2010 whitepaper by Web Analytics Demystified and the Altimeter Group, the authors propose aligning KPIs to social business objectives and offer formulas for calculating success.

They set out a simple framework of four Social Business Objectives and associated KPIs:

Don’t overlook keyword search

Finally, don’t forget keyword search! It’s one of the key components of search marketing and should be a part of any metrics program you undertake. By analyzing your site and social media accounts for key words and phrases, you’ll be able to correct bad keyword choices and begin to drive more traffic from people searching for information about your cause or sector.